The Way Things Were Read Online Free Page B

learning Sanskrit via Skype from New York. Your father would have loved that: no greater comment,’ she says in a heavy voice, ‘on the state of Indian learning in India. Good. Well, you have everything you need?’
    ‘Yes.’
    And now, as he rings off, in earnest, he wonders,
Why not?! Why not stay a while? I do have everything I need, why not stay and let the heat build and the rains come? Why not translate – for this is due quite soon –
The Birth of Kumara
here, in this place where my father has lived, and was for a while at least very happy, and where the city beyond is full of acquaintances, if not friends? Why not?!
    He drags his status from Do-Not-Disturb to Invisible, and watches for a while as his Skype contacts, their day in New York under way, check in and out.
    Turning over thoughts of leaving and staying, he remembers the ashes. His father’s ashes, and their immersion at Prayaga. With this in mind, he calls his mother back.
    ‘Darling, how should I know? Your father would have known. But he’s not here to ask. Why don’t you ask Tripathi?’
    ‘OK. I will. Just tell me this: is there any particular time before which I must immerse them?’
    ‘I suppose,’ Uma said. ‘You can’t just leave your father’s ashes in a biscuit tin on top of the fridge.’
    ‘They’re in an urn.’
    ‘Ah, good. Then relax. Ashes don’t go off.’

It was 1972 when Uma Fatehkotia decided to become an air hostess. It happened after a conversation with her friend, Priti Purie, the daughter of a navy admiral. Uma sat in a chair by the telephone table, in the great gloom of Fatehkot House, as Priti’s brassy voice came down the line.
    ‘Mishi, darling, I just went to him, my father, and I told him I’m doing it. He said, in his best Admiral’s voice, “Prits, are you asking me or are you telling me?” I said, “Daddy, I’m telling you.” And then . . . he let loose. “Air hostesses, little better than whores. Sailors of the modern age. The kind of women who become stewardesses . . . Admiral’s daughter this, Admiral’s daughter that . . . Did I send you to the best schools in the country so that you could mince up and down aisles serving white men their coffee?” I let him have his fill, Mishi. But my mind was made up: I was doing it, regardless of what he thought. I wanted to get out and it was the only way. And, let me tell you, Mish, it’s been what . . . three years now? . . . and I’ve loved every minute of it. Nairobi five days . . . Singapore, the Raffles Hotel . . . Mauritius, Dubai, Hong Kong; I’ve lived in London. Gloucester Road . . . King’s Road . . . free tickets, phalana, phalana. And when I began, haw, nothing could have been more shocking; and, now look, the doors are wide open: girls of the best families are doing it. Meeting their husbands on planes, if you please. The eternal promise of trolley to lolly.’
    Priti Purie was a beautiful green-eyed girl; tiny, fair-skinned, articulate. She spoke in that accent known as ‘educated subcontinental’ and Mishi drank in her words, making all her reasons and experiences her own. No one had spoken more directly to her. For she also longed to get out, longed to slip the leash of an evil bureaucracy with its P-1 forms, host letters and currency restrictions; most of all, she longed to escape her mother and the stifling gloom of Fatehkot House. Within days of this conversation she went off to the British Airways office in Connaught Place, with its darkened windows and potted plants. It was as busy and social as the Oberoi Hotel, and Priti was right: everyone from the daughters of army chiefs and bureaucrats to those of businessmen, old feudals and even a few princes wanted to be air hostesses.
    Six months later she was in the air. She was twenty-two.
    Mishi’s decision gave her already strained relationship with her mother, Deep, a new line of tension. The announcement came only weeks after the wedding of her younger sister, Isha, to the